My dad took delivery of his yesterday, and it really is a marvel.
Of course, literally all he’ll use it for is as a Plex server so he could have carried on with his M1 mini. But it does mean that I now have an M1 mini to mess about with.
I'm using a 2014 Mac Mini with 4gb of RAM. I did replace the HDD with and SSD as it was unbearably slow. Now it's perfect aside from the OS not getting updates. I wish there was a way for Plex to work with Apple DRM for movies I have on there from the iTunes store.
Don’t tell him about building an unRAID server on a PC. It’s a rabbit hole your dad will love.
Can scale it from cheap used hardware to top of the line server hardware.
I started mine with retired PC hardware and have upgraded it to used commercial server hardware and it’s rock solid with more storage than my office server at work. 😂. The ultimate tinkering platform.
The connector also isn’t a standard m.2 connector. So even if it was as easy as swapping the card out. You wouldn’t be able to change it with a regular NVMe card you buy in the store.